Help with a word

Hello, I would really like to know what 解夏 means in English; I would also like a translation for the lyrics below. I encountered this word in a song where the context is: 解夏噴井の音色 アケビ線路炎陽, from Remind Blue by Jin.

THANKS I REALLY APPRECIATE IT

March 6, 2019

5 Comments

According to the description of 三省堂, an authoritative Japanese publishing company, "解夏" is an end of 修行 called 安居 (Ango) which is held by Buddhist priests in summer, specifically finishes on 8/27, following the solar calendar. The antonym for 解夏 is "結夏".

I'm not an enthusiast of ボカロ as of now but I've heard of songs written by じん before, so perhaps I can't quite interpret the lyrics correctly and transcribe it into English exquisitely but nevertheless I'm going to try to explain:

噴井 is a well spouting water continuously which is, I would imagine, usually located in the provinces embraced by tranquil nature in Japan, and people use it to cool tomatoes, gourds, cider (サイダー, Japanese beverages seasoned with sugar and fruit, it tastes like lemonade and is usually sold at food stands in Japanese summer festivals) and that kind of thing - I can conceive hearing the loquacious timbre (= 音色) of the water vividly!

アケビ is a shrub which usually fruits maturely in fall as it's a 季語 (technicalities on 俳句) representative of the season, but in late-summer, the fruit of it tastes prematurely luscious. 線路 means a railway, notice that there're plenty of plants like アケビ around railways in the countryside in Japan. 炎陽 is another epithet for the sun, specifically for that in summer.

I reckon the songs and their lyrics written by him are sometimes ambivalent in its coherency, as the transcription would be like the one NicoNiNorwegian has written in this discussion, but I felt like his poetic diction was reminiscent of the picturesque scenery in one's cradle which can be remembered, but not experienced again.

Well, firstly, because of the etymological background of the Buddhist technicalities transcribed from Sanskrit through Chinese into Japanese, there are a lot of those written in Kanjis that are not representative of the idea of the term, but the phonological characteristics. That kind of 熟語 in general, words consisting of only Kanjis, is called 当て字 / 宛字 (あてじ).

And from my experience of learning about Buddhism in my school about a year ago, I recognised that most of the terms are 当て字 so that this time I too thought that there's no point trying to interpret them by searching the meanings of the constituent Kanjis, respectively; however, that approach appeared not to be inefficient to know the meaning as I found after searching and posting, because 解 and 夏 suggest a coherent shade about itself, as you had been thinking.

This is as best as I can understand it - it's the end of a training period for monks that takes place in late summer. Calling it a graduation seems lacking, but it's the nearest comparison I can think of, if the monks who went through that training period are meant to come to the end of it with a better understanding of the material they're training for than they did when they started. Considering your explanation of the rest of the imagery in the line given for context, enlightenment is the only term I can think of that encompasses that idea and plays with the theme of summer as well. The sense I got from this latest post, though, is that trying to explain any of this fully with just those characters and a dictionary definition is like trying to fit a novel into a tweet.